Who Needs Facebook? Tune Taps MobileDevHQ To Help With Unpaid Acquisition

This year started out a bit rocky for Tune (née HasOffers), but the app attribution company seems to be moving on with Monday’s acquisition of MobileDevHQ.

The purchase is part of Tune’s bid to build out its user acquisition attribution capabilities.

The move comes a little more than a month after the company’s rebrand from HasOffers to Tune, which one could argue was part of an effort to distance itself from its fallout with Facebook last February over how Tune, then HasOffers, handled customer access to device-level performance and attribution data. According to Tune, however, the rebrand was in the works for nine months, way before anything happened with Facebook.

But back to the acquisition. As it stands, Tune’s MobileAppTracking tool is primarily focused on the paid attribution analytics. The companies have been partnering on initiatives and integrations for some time. MobileDevHQ is all about search and inbound app marketing, a capability Tune CEO Peter Hamilton said will complement his company’s offerings.

“[MobileDevHQ] has been working on the unpaid side of user acquisition, which, quite honestly contributes over half the volume of users downloading and installing mobile apps every day,” Hamilton said. “Currently, MobileAppTracking doesn’t give any insight beyond the fact that an install came organically, but we want to provide a more holistic view to marketers.”

MobileDevHQ tracks mobile search and organic inbound data with the aim of helping advertisers get a handle on app store visibility and discoverability and improve search ranking by understanding which keywords were most successful.

“It’s all done with an eye on optimization for what happens both in the app store and what’s going on outside, as well as providing competitive analysis,” said MobileDevHQ’s CEO and cofounder Ian Sefferman.

Several MobileDevHQ clients will be making the move over to Tune, including hotels.com, R/GA and Experian.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. MobileDevHQ had raised $1.1 million since the 10-person company opened its doors in 2009, according to CrunchBase.

Although he wouldn’t go into more detail, Hamilton said Tune is looking to make some announcements soon around multi-touch attribution and mobile retargeting. As for what may or may not happen down the line with Facebook, Hamilton was diplomatic.

“Right now, we’re staying focused on our clients needs,” Hamilton said. “We can’t control our relationship with Facebook. Obviously, we’re still friendly with them and want to continue to be helpful in the future should they want to work with us, but we’re not banking on that or expect that to come about. We’re just going to keep bringing as much forward-thinking technology to market as we can.”